Personal reflections on process-oriented writing approach
This chapter provides an overview of research and studies on definitions and effectiveness of writing process approach. For me as a Chinese English teacher, I find it very insightful and implicative for my future teaching of writing in the following aspects:
First of all, it emphasizes the importance of teaching writing as a process instead of getting a finalized product. In English writing history, there were many related research and studies examining how teachers can teach writing more effectively and improve students’ writing qualities, and teachers’ instructions have been constantly renovated; however, in China, English writing is still taught by traditional methods in a majority of schools, which means teachers usually assign a topic to students and then collect final products to give some general and simple feedback. Therefore, forming an awareness of using a process-oriented writing teaching approach is the most important lesson I learn after reading this chapter.
In order to make an effective writing instruction, we also need to integrate different strategies into the writing process, instead of just letting students struggle or hang about in the process. The author mentions several concepts such as prewriting, revisions, subprocess of writing, using self-regulation strategy, and developing reader-awareness and reading-writing connections, etc. These are all necessary scaffolding strategies which can help students negotiate through the writing process, especially for my ESL students. We don’t want to simply throw them a concept of writing process and divide four or five stages for them, and then leave them alone.
Besides, as is often true with professional writers, the writing process is not fixed in order. We should be aware that each student may have her own unique process for writing. There are some individual differences in it. Some students may have more pre-writing thoughts than others; others may do better in one-time writing. We should respect each student’s own preference to writing and focus more on providing effective instructions.
In addition, for some teachers, especially some new teachers, when they first learn the pedagogy of process writing, they may tend to focus most of their attention on how to implement this pedagogy so much so that they ignore assessing the impacts on improving students’ writing qualities. So teachers need to remind themselves in the process of teaching that the most significant point of adopting any instruction is to help our students make improvements in the regarding areas and provide necessary scaffolding.
This chapter provides an overview of research and studies on definitions and effectiveness of writing process approach. For me as a Chinese English teacher, I find it very insightful and implicative for my future teaching of writing in the following aspects:
First of all, it emphasizes the importance of teaching writing as a process instead of getting a finalized product. In English writing history, there were many related research and studies examining how teachers can teach writing more effectively and improve students’ writing qualities, and teachers’ instructions have been constantly renovated; however, in China, English writing is still taught by traditional methods in a majority of schools, which means teachers usually assign a topic to students and then collect final products to give some general and simple feedback. Therefore, forming an awareness of using a process-oriented writing teaching approach is the most important lesson I learn after reading this chapter.
In order to make an effective writing instruction, we also need to integrate different strategies into the writing process, instead of just letting students struggle or hang about in the process. The author mentions several concepts such as prewriting, revisions, subprocess of writing, using self-regulation strategy, and developing reader-awareness and reading-writing connections, etc. These are all necessary scaffolding strategies which can help students negotiate through the writing process, especially for my ESL students. We don’t want to simply throw them a concept of writing process and divide four or five stages for them, and then leave them alone.
Besides, as is often true with professional writers, the writing process is not fixed in order. We should be aware that each student may have her own unique process for writing. There are some individual differences in it. Some students may have more pre-writing thoughts than others; others may do better in one-time writing. We should respect each student’s own preference to writing and focus more on providing effective instructions.
In addition, for some teachers, especially some new teachers, when they first learn the pedagogy of process writing, they may tend to focus most of their attention on how to implement this pedagogy so much so that they ignore assessing the impacts on improving students’ writing qualities. So teachers need to remind themselves in the process of teaching that the most significant point of adopting any instruction is to help our students make improvements in the regarding areas and provide necessary scaffolding.